Grow together
by trip-trap
Summary: Kindness, favour, Haymitch. One of these is not like the others. A Post-Mockingjay story.


**Grow together.**

Chaff used to complain about the hand they gave him. "Itches," he'd grunt. It had some movement, such was the prowess of the Capitol's medical-mechanical skill, but no sensation. He took to leaving it off, waving his stump around during arguments for emphasis to watch the other guy flinch. That was his sense of humour. It's different when it's a leg, Haymitch supposes.

Peeta's face is whitened with pain as he sits across from Haymitch at the kitchen table. He drums his fingers against the surface. There are lines around his eyes that have deepened in the last few months. "I've been putting it off," he bluntly admits. "But it's getting to the point where I'm almost falling over every time I try to walk even ten paces. The medic said I need to take care of it soon or my balance might be ruined."

"Hmm," Haymitch says. "The timing could be better."

Peeta grimaces. "Tell me about it."

"She's not happy, I take it."

The pain lightens from Peeta's face, the way it always does, when she's mentioned. "She's just mad I didn't do anything about it when it started hurting. But I only really noticed it was a problem after Rosie came, and being a parent is a two-person job. I could hardly leave her alone with it when _I_was the one –" He cuts himself off. Haymitch is glad. He already audiences enough of their marital drama; he doesn't need to be explicit confidante on top of that. Peeta clears his throat. "Anyway, she would never ask, but."

Haymitch rolls his eyes. "Like I'm not over there all the time _anyway_," he says.

"Good," Peeta smiles.

oOo

There are small feet jumping on Haymitch's face. No, hands. Patting.

"Waaaaaake up," Rosemary sing-songs. "Daddy says I get to waaaaake you up. Every morning! Waaaaake up."

Peeta, Haymitch thinks uncharitably, obviously learned _how_ to torture while_ being_tortured. It's the kind of thought he could never say out loud. He blindly reaches out and grabs Rosemary by the waist, hauling her head over heels into the bed. She's lighter than feathers. She's giggling in that high-pitch that should be painful, this early and vaguely hungover, but instead makes Haymitch grin. He tickles her a little before sitting up. The sun is barely in the sky. He glares at it, and then down at Rosemary, and then over at the door where Peeta is leaning, arms crossed over his chest, amused.

"Mama's downstairs," Rosemary says. She wiggles closer to Haymitch, leans her dark head against his arm, and adds, "Your breath smells bad."

"That's from eating all the little girls who wake me up too early," he tells her.

Her blue eyes round into perfect, delighted circles.

"Rosie, come on," Peeta says. "Let's let Haymitch get up." Early on, Peeta tried to get her to call Haymitch 'Uncle Haymitch'. Haymitch shut that down fast.

Rosemary jumps out of bed and runs to Peeta and takes his hand. Her hand is absurdly small wrapped up in his. She's not even five. When they walk out the door, Haymitch blearily notes the way Peeta has to move, unnaturally balanced, to compensate. Haymitch was with him when he woke, those years ago. The surgery had been live broadcast to all of Panem in vivid detail; had been one of the highlights of the 74th. But there had been no cameras when Peeta regained consciousness, when the knowledge of how his body had changed spilled across his face. He'd been shocky, a little numb. He'd said something vaguely funny. Haymitch doesn't remember what, now. They'd laughed a little. The first thing Peeta asked was, "Katniss?" And Haymitch had been so – so _grateful _– that he could nod. Yes, she's alive. Yes, she's whole.

Peeta smiled then a little like how he smiles at his daughter now.

When Haymitch finally gets down the stairs, the door to the yard is open and his geese are honking as they're fed. Rosemary flings handfuls of their food from a sack her mother holds open. Haymitch sees them in profile. Rosemary's mother looks down at her, face calm. She's older, and healed, but the first thought Haymitch will always think upon seeing her is: _I saw you set the world on fire._

oOo

The train comes after breakfast. Gale and Johanna are on it. They get off for a few moments, to say hello. Gale shows his age more than does Johanna, who seems to grow younger every year free of the Games. Gale and Katniss draw off to exchange a handful of words. They really do look like family, with their black hair and dark skin and Seam eyes; could be family except for the way he looks at her still, the sidelong way he glances at her rounded belly, the wistfulness in how he touches Rosemary, who _does _call him 'Uncle'. When they get back on the train, Peeta goes with them. He leaves with a kiss to Rosemary's forehead, and with Katniss' eyes burning into him. He glances at Haymitch as the train doors start to close. There's a plea and a warning both in his gaze. Haymitch nods. The train starts to move and Katniss' hands betray her, flying to her mouth.

Haymitch saw it happen and he still doesn't believe it, sometimes, that Katniss Everdeen fell in love.

oOo

Haymitch is no baker, but he's better than Katniss and Rosemary is better than them both. She bosses them around the bakery's kitchen until they have dough set to rise, and then she bosses them into baking her cookies. "The baby wants chocolate ones," Rosemary insists. Her hair is braided to keep it out of the way, no-nonsense and practical.

"I don't know," Katniss teases. "I think maybe oatmeal –"

"No, no, no," Rosemary shakes her head. The braid goes flying with the force of her enthusiasm. "_Chocolate_. He wants _chocolate_." She puts her ear against Katniss' belly, probably the only person alive – including Peeta – who can do that and get away with it. Rosemary nods. "Yes, chocolate, he just said." Her eyes are huge and guileless. Haymitch dreads the day she figures out she can get him to do anything with eyes like those. Katniss smirks at him over her head, because she already knows.

They bake the cookies and snack on them, and then flavour the bread dough with nuts and raisins, and then twist the dough into loaves and buns and then leave them to rise a second time. Katniss tries to get Rosemary to make different shapes with her share of the dough, but Rosemary wears a serious frown and says, "No, it has to be _just like _Daddy's bread." She doesn't really understand what it means that Peeta has gone to the Capitol. She thinks he'll be back for dinner; she thinks she can show him the bread she's made.

By the next day, it's sunk in and Rosemary makes their lives miserable.

"She talked to Peeta on the phone this morning," Katniss explains, haggard. "He called to say he got there safe, and to read her a story." Rosemary is stomping around Haymitch's yard. Her hair is a rat's nest of snarls and cowlicks. "We tried to explain to her, where he went, what he's doing. But it's hard. He's never been gone for longer than an hour. How can we expect her to understand?" Katniss winces with one hand against her belly. Her pregnancies have been active ones. When it was Rosemary in there, sometimes Haymitch would actually _see_the little foot kick, the little fist punch. It was incredibly disturbing. Rosemary starts to yell, running at the geese that startle and flap backwards, though that won't last. Soon they'll be attacking.

"Right, that's enough," Haymitch decides. He goes into the yard and picks up Rosemary and slings her across his back, head down. He keeps hold of her kicking legs. She beats against his spine.

"Let me go! Let me go! I want Daddy! _I want my Daddy!_"

"Well you've got _me_, sweetheart," Haymitch says. He needs to be drunk for this, but he's disgustingly sober instead. Rosemary shrieks, and it's like a sonic bomb going off. Haymitch goes stoic. He's survived worse. "I'm taking her to the Meadow to run off all the energy," he tells Katniss as he passes, and Katniss' wan face nods.

Last night Haymitch heard her pacing in her room from the kitchen downstairs, where he'd slept at the table, keeping guard. It was probably stupid. Even if Katniss had needed defending in the night, what good would Haymitch be? He's years past his prime. But it was part of what he'd promised Peeta, and so he did it, foolish as he felt. He would have felt worse in his own house, anxious and tense with wondering if she needed him.

By the time they're at the Meadow, Rosemary is weeping. It's not the loud histrionics that would exasperate him, but the quiet gulping tears that leave him helpless. Haymitch settles on the ground and lets her cuddle against him. He's awkward patting her little back. She's the first experience he's had with a small child since he'd helped raise his little brother, decades ago. Sean had been young when he'd died. Not yet twelve. If he'd been twelve, he would have been Reaped, Snow was that angry with Haymitch. If they'd lost the war, a handful of years from now Rosemary would be Reaped. It's been years since Haymitch has felt it, that horror and grief, years that he's drowned and deadened with liquor. But thinking of Rosemary in the arena, Rosemary at the bloodbath, Rosemary made martyr or Victor or – and he feels vast waves of tenderness crash over him. Not this little girl. Never this little girl. Not this girl who he loves.

"I'm sorry," Rosemary sobs. "I'm sorry I'm bad, I just can't help it sometimes."

Haymitch clears his throat. "You're not bad, sweetheart." He rocks her soothingly. "You're never bad. Just loud, sometimes." Her little hands clutch at his shirt-front. "But that's ok. Sometimes you have to be loud."

"Haymitch," Rosemary says his name like it's a secret. "You're my favourite."

Haymitch smiles. "You're mine, too."

oOo

Rosemary is asleep in her room, because they're all agreed that she needs a nap, when Haymitch sits down at the kitchen table across from Katniss and watches her eye her bow. It's unstrung and gleaming, aged polished wood well-loved by her hands.

"I wonder how he learned to make them," she says. She doesn't reference Rosemary's tantrum at all. She never really knows how to handle Rosemary's darker turns of mood. Peeta once explained that Rosemary's unhappiness – no matter how minor – made Katniss doubt her own worth as a mother. She focuses on something else, instead. "My father. I know he made more than one, but I wonder how he learned. If he would have taught me, if he'd lived long enough."

"He would have," Haymitch says. "It was something passed down in your family. There've always been Everdeen bows around District Twelve."

Katniss flashes a glance at him. Quicksilver, and questioning. It's because, Haymitch realizes, of the bitterness in his voice.

He grimaces. "Nevermind." Ancient history should stay in the past, buried where it belongs.

"No, tell me," Katniss says immediately, because she has never taken the easy way out of anything.

"Your father," Haymitch says, measuring out his words, "supplied weapons for District Twelve insurgents."

Katniss blinks at him. "What?"

"Carob Everdeen and Strom Hawthorne were two of the leaders of the underground resistance movement," Haymitch says. "The most identifiable ones. They – this can't be a surprise to you," he says. "Your father taught you the hanging tree song. _This can't be a surprise_."

But it is. Her face is paling, her eyes enlarged. "What," she whispers again, only it's not a question this time. "What do you mean. What are you saying."

"Dammit, sweetheart," Haymitch sighs. Then he tells her.

District Twelve bred cockiness like a genetic trait, back in the day. Haymitch's dose got him out of the arena, but it also got everyone he'd ever loved murdered in retribution. As such, he advised caution to the young idiots who planned insurrection. Given his inebriated state, he can't say that he truly blames their dismissal of his experienced words. But they weren't careful enough – or maybe it really was just blind, dumb luck that the two young charismatic leaders ended up on the same crew when before they'd always led their own shifts, in a detail filled with their followers, on the day that the mine collapsed.

"You're saying – they were – my father was murdered?" Katniss' lips are almost white.

"No one knows for sure," Haymitch says. He wants a drink. He wants one badly. He shrugs, instead. "That was the point. No one knew if it was deliberate. No one knew if they were being watched, if they were being monitored, if they were next. Didn't you ever wonder why no one helped you after he died? Part of it was a genuine lack of help to give. But part of it was fear, too. If they showed you sympathy, maybe it would convince the Capitol that they were also rebels. It was a death sentence."

"Did... did my mother know?"

Haymitch's throat clenches. "Yeah, sweetheart," he murmurs. "She knew."

"And – and, Prim? She only had her name in _once_. Was she Reaped because of, because of our father?"

"I don't know," Haymitch says helplessly. "It could be that they wanted to remind anyone who still remembered, send a message. It could have just been chance."

Katniss shakes her head, not in denial but in horror. She stares at the bow like it's personally betrayed her, then gets up, throws it from the table, and stumbles up the stairs.

Part of Haymitch is thinking, _Fuck_. Another part is remembering an old proverb, something about the sins of the fathers. He waits a few minutes, then slowly thuds up the stairs. The door to Katniss' room is open. Not wide, but ajar. He nudges his way through. She's sitting on the bed, arms wrapped around her belly, braid over her shoulder, staring blankly out the window. She's crying. The way her daughter cries. It has the same power over Haymitch; it makes him helpless in the exact same way.

"I think," Katniss says after a long pause. Her voice is half-choked. "I could have understood it. Maybe. Before Rosemary. Before," one hand on her stomach spasms. "But he had _us_. He had us and he still did – he still, he still _risked_." She makes a strangled sound. "We should never have been born. If he was going to do – he should never have had us."

"Sweetheart," Haymitch says, heartbroken for her. She still thinks in terms of survival. Of food and readiness and the ability to kill. "Having you was what made him think he could change the world. Having you made him _want to_." He walks over. He sits next to her. Not close enough to touch. But close enough to say: "He was a good man. Your father. And your mother's a good woman. It was the world at fault. They did the best they could. They tried to do what they thought was right. You have, too."

Katniss is stiff-necked even while nodding her head. She doesn't believe him, yet. She might never. But people can change. Maybe one day she will.

oOo

At that night's dinner, they eat Rosemary's bread. She beams around the table and kicks her feet. "Isn't it good?"

"Very good," Haymitch says.

"The best," Katniss says.

"Yum!" Rosemary says.

oOo

Peeta calls that evening. Haymitch tries not to listen in as Rosemary chatters excitedly, and then as Katniss speaks in low even tones. She's obviously trying not to stress Peeta, who is fasting on the eve of an operation. The Capitol's made advances in prosthetic technology, apparently; specifically nerve-mapping and mimicking. They've had great success with other trial patients. It's hopeful Peeta might gain some sensation in the new prosthetic, which will have a connection to the spine. The procedure isn't normally available, but this is Peeta Mellark, and exceptions are made.

"Gale or Johanna, though, one of them is always with you?" It's the first time Katniss sounds anxious. Whatever the reply is makes her smile. "Good." Then she laughs. "I'm glad too. I – the baby's been kicking all day today. I think he misses you." A pause, as Peeta says something. Then another laugh, and a teasing, "Maybe." Then, "Me, too." And finally, holding the receiver away from her face, "Haymitch, get over here. Peeta wants to talk to you."

Haymitch gives up the pretence that he hasn't been eavesdropping and ambles over. Peeta sounds tired over the line. "Ho, Haymitch," he greets.

"Peeta," Haymitch says.

"Is everything well?"

"Well enough," Haymitch says. He can't say, _Your daughter was in tears because of you, and your wife was in tears because of me_. If for no other reason than it would wreck the artificial calm Katniss has worked so hard to construct.

Peeta is quiet a moment longer than he should be, which is telling enough. When he speaks, he sounds forcedly cheery. "All right. I'll see you in a few days, then."

"Looking forward to it," Haymitch agrees. He passes the phone back to Katniss, who gives him a dry look and speaks into it for a few brief seconds before hanging up. She hugs herself and frowns.

"I – well, you know," she says. Haymitch nods, but he doesn't know: he has no one left to worry over, except those in the house with him now.

oOo

That night Haymitch sleeps on the living room couch. It's not the most uncomfortable he's ever been, so he can bear it well enough. There are little pills he can take to be able to stay sober without suffering horrible side effects. They make him feel a little jittery, like the blood in his veins is jumping up and down, but they leave him in better condition than he'd be without them. He sweats a little bit too much. At three in the morning he has to get up and walk around outside. He sees the sleep-shapes of his geese bedded down in his yard. Their feathers rustle. They smell truly horrible. They look different from this vantage point. Sideways, and slant. He clicks at them and one lifts its head, while another side-steps and waggles its round body. The motion makes Haymitch want to laugh himself sick, it's that absurd. He muffles the giggles with his fist. Goes back inside. Back to the couch. Pulls the blankets up over his face. He thinks he can sleep now. He does.

oOo

In the morning over toast and tea, Haymitch tells Rosemary, "Your grandfather taught me how to shoot a bow."

"Reaaaaaally?" she asks. Katniss' hands are in her hair, combing it smooth. They still at Haymitch's words.

"That's right," Haymitch says. "We were second cousins. I don't think I ever said. Same great-grandmother. It was a small district, back then. Lots of folks were related. Your Grandpa Carob was good to me. A few years older. He taught me how to hunt."

"_Wow_," Rosemary says with shining eyes, and smashes an entire slice of raspberry jam toast into her mouth.

oOo

Katniss needs to lie down in the afternoon, so Haymitch takes Rosemary wandering through the forest. "You come from a family of hunters," he tells her. She grabs his hand so that she can swing it as they walk. Her hair blows in loose black curls around her face. After a while she gets tired, so he carries her on his shoulders, her thin twiggy arms hugging his head. She hums and taps a rhythm against his forehead and her tiny feet kick against his chest.

"Haymitch, if you're a hunter, you have to kill things, don't you?"

"That's right," he says.

"I don't want to kill anything."

"Then you don't have to," he says.

"Mama won't mind?"

"She'll be happy. You had an aunt who decided the same thing. Your mama was very proud of her."

Rosemary hums, makes up a new beat, and then says, decisively, "Good."

oOo

That night after Peeta has called (the surgery went well, now he just needs a few days of recovery and he can do the physiotherapy at home) and Rosemary is put to bed, Haymitch and Katniss sit playing cards. It's boring enough with only two players and neither of them is much good. They split a cask of apple juice.

"What I wouldn't give for a drink," Haymitch grouses.

"Tell me about it," Katniss says.

"You and me," Haymitch says. "After that kid is out of you."

Katniss raises her apple juice glass. "It's a date."

Haymitch clinks his own against it. "To sobriety," he says. "May we never have to suffer it again."

She gives him her rare pleased smile, like he's told a joke only she understands.

They're two of a kind, he and Katniss. The only two of their kind left in this brave new world.

oOo

Haymitch wakes too early the next morning, heart trying to fight its way out of his chest. He doesn't have nightmares the same way Katniss does, and he doesn't have episodes like Peeta's, but some nights he wakes up ready to kill. The motion is in him, and the intent. He wakes up and he could do it. He doesn't want to – he never wants to. But if he has to, he can, and he will.

There's nothing that needs killing, though, so he settles back down. He stares at the ceiling near where Katniss is asleep. After a while he gets up and goes out, taking her bow and a few of the tidily kept ropes. He does this every so often to keep his skill-set sharp. He's back in the house three hours later with a groosling and two squirrels, whistling and cheerful and ready to eat.

oOo

Sometimes he hears Katniss singing. She does it almost absentmindedly now. In the kitchen, in the hallway, in the garden.

During her trial, they showed footage of her singing to herself in her cell-like room, her voice eerily beautiful even as she shed skin grafts like some strange mutt, monstrous and unnatural. She was the very definition of unstable. Haymitch had campaigned long and hard for her. Didn't the Mockingjay deserve compassion, he said. Didn't she need care? He would take custody of her, he said. He would be both guard and jailor.

He would never leave her side.

oOo

By the fifth day, Haymitch is dangerously irritable. It's not so much that he _needs _a drink. The little pills make it easy to be sober. No shakes, no hallucinations. But he wants to be drunk. He longs for it. He stomps around and scowls at his geese, and glares at Rosemary when she mimics him. Katniss finds him amusing and he feels foolish, old. It's a bad day. He hides out in his own damn house for a few hours, but even there an Everdeen haunts him: Katniss' mother phones from District Four.

"Haymitch," she says, and her face at sixteen flashes through his mind. Arnica Buirns had turned every head, her and the Donner twins. "Katniss called wanting to talk about her father." A beat. "There's a reason I never told her some things."

Haymitch rolls his eyes. "She's a grown woman," he says.

"I know that tone," Katniss' mother says. "You've always been convinced you knew more and better than everyone else." Another pause, longer and deliberate. "I bet you still think it was _Maysilee_in the arena with you all those years ago."

By the time Haymitch has gathered enough of his shock together to form a question, Katniss' mother has hung up on him.

oOo

It shifts his view.

They must have switched places – when? If they were going to do it, why not volunteer? It must have happened when they said goodbye, before they were taken to the trains, in the private room. Maysilee and Madderlin. Which one did Haymitch know in the last gasp of her life?

It doesn't change anything; it's in the past. But she'd gone into the arena with that secret clutched close to her chest, refused to give it to the Capitol, and that – _wrenches _Haymitch.

oOo

In Katniss' house Rosemary is playing with paints on the living room floor on top of a tarp. She misses her father so of course she paints. He's been teaching her. Katniss is on the couch that by night is Haymitch's bed. She's flipping through that book. Hers and Peeta's, their ever evolving testament of the world they'd helped to change, their collection of faces and names and small kindnesses. When Haymitch stomps in, neither mother nor daughter looks up. They expect him. Whenever he comes, whenever he goes.

He settles next to Katniss and watches her read through her book. He's never touched the book. He's never added to it the long list he's built and been building all his life. He clutches those losses tight. He doesn't know how to pry them loose and set them down.

He doesn't know if he wants to learn.

oOo

In the morning Peeta walks through the front door. Rosemary jumps at him, shrieking. He's probably too unsteady to try catching her, but he does anyway. She babbles, "I missed you, I missed you," and he holds her little weight tight. "Me too," Peeta says. "Me too, Rosie, me too." He walks forward on his new leg. His balance is still off but that can improve. Gale and Johanna are behind him, ready to catch him if he topples. Katniss comes down the stairs, hair loose and so blatantly pregnant in her nightgown that it almost embarrasses Haymitch to see her. Her eyes warm from flint to smouldering ash.

"Right," Haymitch says, standing up from the couch and shaking off his blankets. He walks forward and claps Peeta on the shoulder. "Welcome home," he says, then nods to Gale and Johanna on his way out the door.

"Where's _he _going?" he hears Johanna ask, and Katniss answers, "Where else? To get drunk," before the door swings shut.

Like always when it comes to Haymitch, she's not wrong.

oOo

Peeta comes over in the afternoon, when Rosemary is probably napping. Peeta's face twists in disapproval when he sees Haymitch, drunken in the yard, staring at his geese. Peeta looks like his mother when he wears that expression. That's another thought Haymitch could never say out loud. Still, when Haymitch proffers the bottle, Peeta takes a drink.

"So," Peeta says, sitting next to Haymitch and passing back the bottle.

"So," Haymitch echoes. Then he asks, "How was the Capitol?"

"They're calling it something else these days."

Haymitch shrugs. "It'll always be the Capitol."

"Maybe for us," Peeta says. He takes the bottle again for another pull. "But maybe not for Rosie." His new leg jolts slightly, and he winces, tapping it. "It's going to be doing that for a while. It feels a little strange."

"It's a new world," Haymitch remarks. He's at the point of drunkenness where he can still talk and think relatively clearly, but all his emotions are edgeless and far away.

"It's the same world," Peeta corrects. He sighs. "Everyone there tries to pretend that the past is a newsreel or a storybook. But it's the same complicated world it's ever been. Only now there's not as much to stop people from being kind to each other."

"I used to think you were something of an idealist," Haymitch says. "Now I don't know what you are."

"Human," Peeta says. "We all are."

oOo

Early the next morning, Rosemary jumps on Haymitch and he wakes ready to kill. Her shrill little girl laugh fills his ears and he tickles her, instead.

"Haymitch, Haymitch," she sing-songs. She smells like baking bread. He carries her under his arm all the way down the stairs. She shrieks with joy and waves her arms and kicks her feet. She's unafraid and beloved. She squirms out of his grasp in the kitchen, where Peeta is rolling up some sort of pastry. He looks over at them and smiles. "I woke up Haymitch," Rosemary says.

"Good job," Peeta says. "Do you want to help me with the croissants?"

"Yes!" Rosemary says, and prances to his side. Peeta smoothes his palm down the back of her head, to her neck, touching to make sure she's real. Haymitch looks away.

He joins Katniss out in the yard, where she's bemusedly staring at the geese that cluster close to her. "They think you'll feed them," he says.

"I don't know why," she says. "I'm not the kind of person who would feed everything that's hungry. That was always Prim."

"Maybe you could be," Haymitch says. Uncharacteristically somber, he adds, "Maybe I could be too."

The odds, he thinks, are in their favour.

**Disclaimer & Notes****:** the books and characters are obviously not mine; I'm just taking them out for a spin. I wrote this as a follow-up piece to **Follow ** and **Katniss Gets Fat**, though you don't have to read those to get this. I also wrote this because someone sent me a really nice PM and requested it. I was already sort of thinking of doing something from Haymitch's perspective, and their kind words helped give me some motivation. So, thanks **Connortemple4evaneva**! I hope this was to your liking. Beta credit goes to El Tatoe, with thanks.


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